nectar

summer started for me on july 22. i’ve had a busy couple weeks. sometimes it seems like everything wonderful happens all at once--i’ll go weeks without anything particularly huge going on, and then CRUNCH, a solid month of crazy fun times with hardly any time to breathe or reflect. i keep thinking of that david grayson quote about journaling: “To live interestingly and deeply, and to tell oneself about it afterward, is to squeeze the last drop of nectar from the wild grapes of experience.” i need to squeeze more nectar! but at the end of the day i’m too exhausted to write or even upload photos.

tonight i only have energy for a garden update, but i’m going to try to find time to at least briefly narrate some of my recent adventures and endeavors pretty soon.

i’m sure that in a few weeks i’ll be so inundated with tomatoes this will seem pathetic, but right now enough toms are ripening that i’m usually able to get a small handful every day, and it’s always exciting.

white currant tomatoes are intensely flavorful, with a fruity tanginess that i love. might be my all-time favorite tomato, at least for now. it's a good thing because i accidentally ended up growing six of these bad boys.

the mystery tomatoes are maturing now too. their flavor is sweet, not super tomato-y...doesn’t blow my mind.

you know how some people need adversity in order to succeed? maybe this tomato plant needed to be declared fail in order to win. these tiny ones are on the garden fail friday plant from july 16, which now has so many baby tomatoes i can’t count them all. dozens! i guess i just needed to be patient--it’s one of those slow-to-mature heirlooms. i think it’s either a black from tula or cherokee purple.

the gonzos are just starting to mature! they’re very strange creatures.

they look like little green brains floating around in fuzzy, cavernous cranial cavities. taste is so completely different from the dried, cooked, whatever-else-has-been-done-to-them gonzos you find at the grocery store. they’re sort of sweet, and the texture is smoother, less mealy.

the bush bean plants are still producing reliably. i pick about a pound a week. one day i harvested half a pound of yellow wax beans alone:

the second round of beans are right on schedule to start producing just when the first round is getting exhausted. the timing worked out perfectly.

the groundcherry is flowering:

so is one eggplant:

cosmos started blooming:

tigridia is awesome:

i like this color much better than the fuchsia one that bloomed before.

these flowers are short-lived, sticking around for less than a day, but each stalk has five or six buds on it that bloom in succession.

one of the other borage plants is starting to bloom just as the first plant is sending up its last few buds. i’ve collected lots of seeds from the older one.

it amazes me that the cucumber plants are still alive, looking healthy, and that one of them is producing. they had such a tough start.

it also amazes me that i have ears of corn developing!

the silks are so colorful when they first pop out...

i’ve learned a lot about the way corn grows. it was a mystery to me before.

check out this crazy-looking fly-type-creature i found the other day. no idea what it is. wish i could’ve gotten better photos but it was pretty dark out.

there were only three days of 100-degree-or-above temperatures in july. we’ve also had more humidity this summer than i can remember ever experiencing here. there was a stretch of days recently when we had rainshowers and thunderstorms, lots of wonderful clouds, and it was so beautiful. now it’s hot and dry again with cloudless skies. once in a while when it's humid i’ll feel this wind that i swear feels exactly like ocean breeze. i close my eyes and i’m at the beach. fabulous weather.

most of my sunflowers are blooming now. this one is over ten feet tall.

sadly i’ve lost five or six buds and flowers to squirrels:

i tied them too close to the gazebo and the cute little bastards couldn't resist.

if i could change one thing about what i did with the garden this year i’d devote more space to sunflowers. next year for sure.

i could take pictures of sunflowers aaallllll day. mmm, fibonaccilicious...

too tired to write captions for the rest of these photos. it’s bedtime.